Rehabilitating Criminal Justice
Innovations in Policing, Adjudication, and Sentencing

This book explains how the criminal justice system can be fixed, in ways that simultaneously protect suspects, victims and society.

Christopher Slobogin (Author)

9781009586924, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 24 April 2025

332 pages
22.8 x 15.1 x 1.8 cm, 0.49 kg

'Slobogin embraces a comprehensive approach to identifying and rectifying the problems with the American criminal justice system … the breadth of the book is extraordinary.' Guha Krishnamurthi, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

Rehabilitating Criminal Justice offers bold yet sensible proposals for reforming every major component of the US criminal justice system. The first third of the book explains how existing caselaw can be interpreted to end over-policing, better regulate interrogations, and replace the exclusionary rule with direct sanctions on officers and their departments. The second part of the book, on the post-arrest adjudication process, calls for replacing cash bail with validated risk assessments and proposes to reorient our error-prone, hyper-adversarial system by ending convictions via guilty pleas and giving judges more power over questioning of witnesses and the selection of experts. The final chapters show how the harshness of the system can be leavened by refocusing sentencing on prevention rather than retribution and by creating an independent criminal court system. They also explain why these reforms are preferable to the currently popular movement to defund police departments and abolish prisons.

Preface
1. Equality in the Streets
2. Police ≠ Community Caretakers
3. Making Interrogation Transparent
4. Holding Police and Criminals Accountable
5. Downsizing Pretrial Detention
6. Accurate Adjudications: Lessons from a Death Penalty State
7. Borrowing from European Trials
8. Rationalizing Plea Bargaining
9. Preventive Justice
10. Reconciling Desert and Risk at Sentencing
11. Specialized Criminal Courts
12. Abolitionism v. Minimalism.

Subject Areas: Criminal law & procedure [LNF]